Zizou top

If his team wins the European championship tonight, this immigrant's son from a Marseille housing estate is set to be his country's national hero - for a second time in two years. Yet he's more than just a footballing icon. His is the face of a new, multi-cultural France.

There is a poster currently decorating the walls of many European towns, particularly in France, that shows a rather grey and grim council-type flat. The legend across the image, which promotes Adidas, says simply: 'Everybody comes from somewhere'. The undesirable apartment in the photo was once inhabited by Zinedine Yazid Zidane, or 'Zizou' as he is known in Italy and France, very possibly the finest football player on the planet.

Today Zidane, already a world champion, will attempt to lead France to victory in the final of the European Championship. Having turned 28 just over a week ago, the French midfielder is in his prime and is firmly in the process of establishing his name alongside other world all-time greats such as Puskas, Pele, Cruyff, Platini and Maradona.

A sportsman of uncharacteristic humility, Zidane tends to be embarrassed by those sorts of comparisons. Although hugely ambitious, his drive to get ahead has been tempered by a strong awareness of where he's come from. The bleak poster home was located in La Castellane, a run-down suburb in the Arab quarter of Marseilles, where Zidane lived with his Algerian parents, Smail and Malika, and their three other French-born sons, Jamel, Farid and Nourredine, and sister, Lila. Zidane moved his parents to a sumptuous villa soon after becoming wealthy. Of his father, he once said: 'He has been my guide in life. He has worked hard for very little return, but for him life is still about human relationships rather than money.'

Often described as a no-go area, owing to the fear it inspires in the town's more conservative citizens, La Castellane is really a no-leave district. There are few opportunities for its largely North African-origin population to get out and make their mark. Which is why Zidane enjoys unparalleled cult status in the high-rise blocks that surround the old Mediterranean port.

The footballer acknowledged the support a while back by paying for the clubhouse for a local football side, the Association des Jeunes de la Nouvelle Vague. If his constituency is La Castellane, his rule nevertheless extends right across France. The two goals he scored in the 1998 World Cup final against Brazil guaranteed him a special place in the hearts of his countrymen. That game - in which, to the disgust of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front, France fielded a team from various ethnic backgrounds - also served to usher in a sense of a new multi-cultural France. And at its creative centre was Zidane, the son of an Algerian supermarket worker. After the match, his image was projected on to the Arc de Triomphe with the message: 'Merci Zizou.'

But it nearly didn't happen like that. Zidane was sent off in the qualifying rounds of France 98 for stamping on the captain of the Saudi Arabian team. Doubters immediately turned to that old saw about being able to take the boy out of the ghetto but not the ghetto out of the boy.

It was a curious criticism because very often Zidane had been accused of appearing too cold and controlled. In fact, Zidane has long possessed an unlikely combination of street-toughness and a Zen-like calm. Jean Varraud, the Cannes scout who first spotted Zizou playing for his boys club, Septemes, recalls the promising teenager quietly walking across the pitch to head-butt an opponent.

'I immediately saw this boy would become a great player,' recalls Varraud. 'He had an exceptional speed of foot that I've never seen before or since. Also he had this warrior side that you find in kids from underprivileged neighbourhoods. He was hungry.'

One story has it that a director at Cannes was furious with Varraud for bringing the 16-year-old Zidane to the club. 'What are you thinking of?' he is supposed to have asked. 'Putting an Arab in the team? Are you mad?' But it was another Cannes director, Jean-Claude Elineau, who invited the youngster to leave the dormitory he shared with 20 other trainees and to come and stay with him and his family. Zidane later said that it was living with the Elineaus that he 'found equilibrium'.

In school, according to his mother, he had been 'a bit distracted'. He practised judo and messed around on a skateboard but football was always his obsession. He used to watch games on TV and felt a magical exhilaration. 'I had an impression of another world, a world of dreams. I couldn't imagine one day it would be mine.'

At Cannes he met his wife, Véronique, a dancer. Together now for more than 10 years, they have two boys, Enzo and Luca, names that have not entirely pleased the more militant Muslims among the player's hometown fans (Zidane see himself as a Muslim but does not practise the faith).

A French sports journalist who remembers Zidane at Cannes describes him then as being 'very lean but with more hair'. A tall, well-built man today, with noble poise and handsomely genial features, Zidane is no friend of the over-head camera. From above, you can see the monkish bald patch that adds years to the already mature-looking man on view from the pitch. In an age of saturation marketing and total image, Zidane's alopecia may possibly have meant that he is lagging behind in the superstar stakes in comparison to, say, the tonsorially blessed (if shaven) David Beckham.

Not that he would be concerned with such matters. Rather he sees himself, in the words of one French journalist who knows him, as a 'craftsman of football'. Certainly, while learning his trade at Cannes, he would not even have hallucinated thoughts of fame and riches. He was overjoyed to receive a £500 bonus on making his first-team debut one month short of his seventeenth birthday in 1989. He immediately sent the money to his parents. A year later he was given a red Renault Clio by the Cannes president and doubtless confusing it for a sports car, spent his leisure hours cruising up and down the Croisette.

From Cannes he was transferred to Bordeaux in 1992 and made his debut for France two years later. He scored twice in that game and went on to be voted the young French player of the year. In 1996 it was time to move again, but this time abroad to Italy.

Leaving aside its sunny climate and glorious belle époque architecture, Marseilles is in many ways reminiscent of English port towns like Liverpool or Newcastle. It has the same kind of provincial independence and bullish identity. So when the young man from La Castellane went to join Juventus in the Alpine city of Turin, he took a friend from home with him.

The Geordie Paul Gascoigne did a similar thing when he left England for Lazio in Rome. The difference being that Zidane's friend was a sensible chap called Malek, while Gazza was accompanied by the perpetually thirsty Jimmy Five Bellies. It was one of many smart decisions that has enabled Zidane, who was endowed with similar skills to Gascoigne, to go on to become peerless while the Englishman has remained but one of a number of gifted players who never fulfilled their potential.

Again, it was not an easy path for Zidane. When he joined up with Juve, he had just finished playing for France in Euro 96, a tournament that was for him a bitter personal disappointment, not least because he was carrying an injury. Having seen Zidane's lacklustre performances, Gianni Agnelli, the legendary president of Juve, expressed the idea that perhaps he had granted funds (what turned out to be a bargain £3.5 million) for the wrong player. But Michel Platini, the sublime French midfield artist who played for Juve in the Eighties, was quick to reassure Agnelli that he had not made a mistake, as would soon become apparent.

Zidane has won two Serie A titles with Juventus as well as losing twice in the final of the European Champions League Cup. His team-mate, the irrepressible Dutchman, Edgar Davids, has said of Zizou: 'He is the footballer I admire most.'

At the 1998 World Cup, Cesare Maldini, the manager of the Italian team, said: 'I would give up five players to have Zizou in my squad.' Footballers throughout the game seem to respect Zidane because while he is an individual who can do just about anything with a ball, he is also an out-and-out team player and one who does not freeze on the big occasion. In 1998 he was voted European and World Footballer of the Year. And he has improved since then. Zidane attributes much of his progress to playing in Italy. He singles out the influence of Piero Ventrone, the Juventus fitness trainer, for dramatically increasing his explosive power (the use of body-building drugs has put Juve under scrutiny by the football authorities in recent years).

Yet there are signs that he may leave Italy soon. His wife is said not to like Turin and there has been talk of a move to Spain or even back to France. 'My heart beats for Olympic Marseille,' he has said, referring to the club he supported as a boy.

But with the way he has played for France in the past few weeks, it's unlikely that Juve would let him go or that Marseilles could afford him. He seems to have everything. An immense strength is allied to the most delicate touch. Looking at his upper body you would never guess at the swift subtlety expressed below the knees. He can run with the ball but is also able to make pinpoint long and short passes without breaking stride. And he scores unforgettable goals.

The whole package has left him indispensable to France. 'If he is not there,' said Aime Jacquet, the French manager during the World Cup, 'the team is not the same.'

One of the ways that it is not the same is that it also tends not to include Zidane's great friend Christophe Dugarry. According to observers of the French national side, Zidane's influence rivals that of Didier Deschamps, the captain, and it said that if they do not rate a player, he does not make it into the team. Equally, many feel that Dugarry would not have made it into the World Cup squad in 98 without the bond he has formed with Zidane.

Coming into the tournament, some wondered if Zidane, who admits to an almost poetic sensitivity, might have been adversely affected by the manner in which Juve needlessly lost the Italian championship on the last day. He returned to Marseilles for a while to recharge his batteries and to attempt to forget the Italian campaign. 'I tried to make myself feel better by telling myself that soccer is just a sport,' he said. 'However, this technique did not work.'

Unusually for a professional footballer, Zidane is still boyishly in love with the game. Following a Juventus fixture on Sunday afternoons the whole team goes to a restaurant in Turin to unwind together. In Italy the the evening match is televised. As the rest of the players chat, Zidane will sit staring at the TV, the kid from La Castellane entranced by a game that no one else can play as well as him.